Books & Guides

In the Time of the Butterflies

By Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez's popular novel is a fictional account influenced by the real lives of the Mirabal sisters, who grew up in the Dominican Republic and were involved in the rebellion against dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1930s. Read more

Bless Me, Ultima

By Rudolfo Anaya

One of the most respected works of Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya tells the story of Antonio Juan Márez y Luna, a young boy who grapples with faith, identity, and death as he comes of age in New Mexico.Read more

Brother, I'm Dying

By Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat was raised by her uncle in Haiti then moved to the United States with parents and siblings she hardly knew. This memoir explores the contrasting lives of her uncle in Haiti and her father in America, delving deep into themes of family, home and tradition.Read more

Love Medicine

By Louise Erdrich

An eclectic range of comic and tragic voices narrate this powerful book about the enduring power of love. Erdrich leads the reader through the interwoven lives of generations of Kashpaws and Lamartines in North Dakota.Read more

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Told through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, F. Scott Fitzgerald's lyrical masterpiece recounts Jay Gatsby's desperate quest to win back his first love as he struggles to recapture the past.Read more

A Lesson Before Dying

By Ernest J. Gaines

A frustrated schoolteacher in 1940s Louisiana tries to give a condemned man back his dignity before he dies. Vivid and compassionate, this novel asks: Knowing we're going to die, how should we live?Read more

A Farewell to Arms

By Ernest Hemingway

A story of love and pain, loyalty and desertion, Ernest Hemingway's World War I novel features the tragedy of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful nurse.Read more

Sun, Stone, and Shadows

By Jorge F. Hernández

This anthology presents a superb selection of the finest Mexican short stories ever written, and offers a glimpse into a diverse and fascinating culture. Authors include Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos, and Carlos Fuentes.Read more

Washington Square

By Henry James

The timeless story of a young girl's desire to please both her disapproving father and the man she loves, this novel follows Catherine Sloper's remarkable transformation from a meek wallflower to a steadfast woman true to her convictions.Read more

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

By Carson McCullers

A teenage outcast, a drunken socialist, a black doctor, and a sad café owner confess their secrets to a deaf-mute, in Carson McCullers's dramatic story of poverty and racism in a 1930s Georgia mill town.Read more

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

By Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a better life in America, and examines how an immigrant's expectations match up to the reality of American life.Read more

The Things They Carried

By Tim O'Brien

Tracing the tour of one American platoon this book is not just a tale of the Vietnam War, although it's considered one of the finest books ever about combat. This award-winning book is a brutal, sometimes funny, often profound narrative about the human heart—how it fares under pressure, and what it can endure. Read more

The Shawl

By Cynthia Ozick

Rosa Lublin is a Holocaust survivor whose memories of a Nazi death camp continue to traumatize her thirty years later. Cynthia Ozick's heartbreakingly empathic novella achieves one of fiction's loftiest goals, giving readers insight into a stranger's heart.Read more

True Grit

By Charles Portis

A classic Western, True Grit recounts the backcountry adventure of a one-eyed marshal, "Rooster” Cogburn, and a spirited fourteen-year-old, Mattie Ross, as they seek to avenge the death of Mattie's father.
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The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

A Dust Bowl saga of the Joad family's rough passage to California and the rougher treatment they find there, John Steinbeck's novel is tragedy and comedy, story and allegory, editorial and epic.Read more

The Age of Innocence

By Edith Wharton

In 1870s New York, Newland Archer and his fiancée seem the perfect match. But when the alluring Countess Ellen Olenska returns home from Europe, Newland must make the most important decision of his life.Read more

The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town

By Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder is the only writer to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and drama. His novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and his play Our Town ask us to examine how we live our precarious, precious lives, whether in small-town America, eighteenth-century Peru, or anywhere else.Read more